Porridge

ESSAY | Why Bother with the Books? – Mia Cresswell-Melstrøm

Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.

ONE POEM – Adrienne Weiss

I find a seat,
hold a headache in my hands, cradle it like a rock
between fingers, think about how this birthday
will be soup and crackers and cancelled plans.

COMFORT FOODS // Sik Fan – Kimi Canete

In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.

TWO POEMS – Chloe Hanks

I remember the shape of the word rainbow
on her puckered mouth, how we sounded
it out from my bedroom window.

ONE POEM – John Dorroh

How did a barrel-chested man learn
this magic? Softened like golden butter
in a dizzy aftermath, he did too many wars perhaps.

COMFORT FOODS // The Taste of Forgiveness – Sarah Islam

We are three siblings, scattered across continents, each of us carrying the taste of a different kitchen.

ONE POEM – Morgan Boyer

Rain upon me your turbulent tales of locker-side loves,
the gossip of girls whose braces still encase their molars

COMFORT FOODS // Gulyás – Liam Skillen

I look at a photo of my Hungarian grandfather and his compatriots in Carr Bank Park, posing by the flowerbeds on Woodhouse Road, and know it is possible to belong to more than a single place.

ONE POEM – Erin Vance

Just as Hemlock
digs its graves in the
carrot family plot

ONE POEM – Alex Stolis

because there’s no way he would ever find it,
being interested only in dinner/work/breakfast
/work/sex on demand/sleep/work.

COMFORT FOODS // Overheard at Terasa Obor – Ana Prundaru

the problem with mici is
they’re all so good
that they don’t even ask you
what you’re ordering

ONE POEM – Elizabeth Seven

So next time you feel so anxious that you can hardly unlock the door,
remember that the world holds your feet

TWO POEMS – KG Newman

First day of the World Series,
autumn hanging on, each tree
seeing who can keep from
being a skeleton the longest

COMFORT FOODS // Bombay Toast – Samarth Agarwal

I see you standing there – starch white lungi draped
7AM freshly shaved – wooden spoon in hand
Commanding your caramelising populace.

ONE POEM – Emilie Delcourt

one bright red strawberry on the strawberry plant

mist still low, tangled in the branches of olive trees

the way the pomegranates hang low
with the burden of their own weight

ESSAY | Trying To See – Erin Ruble

On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.

COMFORT FOODS // Ends and Pieces – Lisa Ochoa

You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?

My mom, that’s who.

Book Review: House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones – Arbnora Selmani

“We are prompted to savour each word, carefully probing between our teeth to discover new morsels of meaning.”

ONE POEM – Brian Alkire

That albino slug
looks like mobile marzipan,
bending its neck for a nap
in the stitchwort
tufted beside the road.

ONE POEM – Paul Bavister

You slid the nit comb through my hair
then rinsed and laughed about how
you loved hunting them down

ONE POEM – Harriet Sandilands

legs floating, brush of seaweed
bulging water moves us
up and down
the shore seems very far away

ESSAY | Initiation – Kate Stukenborg

I wanted to be a part of their club, their conversations, their laughter. Eating, I decided, was my way in.

FLASH FICTION | Blue Pieces of Sky – Mikki Aronoff

Stevie busies himself trying to match two blue pieces of sky. You watch him working the corners and the glands in your throat swell.

ONE POEM – Miriam Ashford

If you walk along a path
between forest and shore
between grains eroded by the sea
they were mountains once

INTERVIEW | Artist Mimi Kunz

I found that writing and art keep me sane, they’re like a room of my own in a time when I’m rarely alone.

TWO POEMS – Stephanie Powell

Am I livestock or the boning knife?
Amongst the timid lambs, half-dreaming

FICTION | Rooms: A Love Letter – Annemarie McCarthy

Inside the atoms of the cavity block extension live the remnants of a thousand John Players.

FICTION | Bruises – Keenan Lew

They say a lot of the work of being poly is scheduling. When I say ‘they’ I mean smug influencers with poorly produced podcasts, and when I say ‘being poly’ I hate myself.

ONE POEM – Marianne Habeshaw

My family observes the emu cage. Beaks so vengeful, I realise we’re taking the piss.

ONE POEM – C.W.Bryan

I first saw her walking,
the folds of her ink blue dress
turning the earth;

POETRY IN TRANSLATION – Bartosz Konstrat, tr. Dawid Mobolaji

But from time to time it does exist. Something like a stray lash under the eyelid
trying to catch its last breath.

TWO POEMS – Cara L. McKee

at least the colour I’m told is
robin’s egg blue, like
boy-baby blankets, like
deep breaths of sunshine.

ONE POEM – Susan G. Byron

It’s these questions I have. (An astral whodunnit: a whydreamit).

ONE POEM – Atma Frans

They’re small animals
wriggling to get out

Just let us touch the crust, they say
feel it crackle

ONE POEM – Satya Bosman

I know it’s over when I picture the train carriage
it’s an old-fashioned carriage with burgundy velvet seats
a little room in my memory.

ONE POEM – Finlay Worallo

You are sun-skinned, but my half
of the planet is tumbling into the dark.

DIGITAL ART – IJWBAA

Family is my way of honouring the Filipino spirit, where the bond of unity, the guidance of elders, and the hope carried by the younger generation come together to form a love that is simple, yet profound—one that transcends individuality and connects us all.